Communists have slaughtered far more than
a hundred million people trying to impose the economic
theology of Marx, Lenin, and the rest.
But in a way, the democratic socialist Intellectuals
were worse than the Communist ones. Their economic nonsense
kept the entire Third World in stagnation and abject misery
for generations. That was worse than death.
All those years, planners trained at Harvard
and the London School of Economics went back to their
native lands and tried to plan their countries out of
poverty.
All the universities were proud that they
had trained economists from all the poor countries.
Every single country these Intellectuals
took over got worse and worse.
The planners themselves, however, did what
they wanted to do: they had a slave population, jobs,
and power. So academics and other wordsmiths still love
socialism.
There are still statues of Lenin here in
Russia, and no social science department in the West is
anything but a rabid fan of Economic Planning.
When some people look at Lenin, they think
of a Great Idealist. Others think of the horrors he caused
or some World Conspiracy idea they have going.
What I see when I look at Lenin is something
that only a battered but all-too-honest old political
expert from South Carolina would see.
To me, Lenin is a guy who was a Hero of
the Working Class who never did an hour's labor in his
entire life.
This is equally true of Marx. This is equally
true of Trotsky. Likewise practically everybody else who
ever championed the Worker as an intellectual hero. None
of them ever produced anything but misery.
Libertarians today, who think they are the
ultimate anti-Communists, continue this tradition of making
economics into a theology. The one thing they insist on
is free markets, with the same religious intensity Communists
and socialists devoted to their recipes.
Libertarians say the free market is the
solution for everything.
Including border problems. Since differences
among peoples mean nothing, and the free market will take
care of them, libertarians insist that the Third World
population should pour into America and Western Europe.
Just crossing that border, say the libertarians,
will make billions of third worlders prosperous First
World Citizens in no time.
The Wall Street journal demands a constitutional
amendment that says: "There shall be no borders."
In other words, their economic theology
will take care of everything.
I think we've had enough of that nonsense.
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